Hello everyone and welcome back to the Bilna Sandeep show. I am Bilna Sandeep, the founder of Homepreneurs Club and managing director of Built Market Lab and Growwie, two marketing agencies based in Dubai. So a lot of you, if you have been already following me on Instagram, you know about one of the huge campaigns we did last month for Homepreneurs Club.
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Introduction and Background
So basically for those who do not know, Homepreneurs Club is a women entrepreneurs networking platform that has been in UAE for the last three years. But if we were to look at the journey of the Homepreneurs Club for the last three years, we were at 50 members and recently when we did this campaign last month, we closed the doors of the club at 174 members. So that is like 2x the growth, right? It’s more than 2x, 2x the number of people.
So how did we achieve that? So this is what we are going to do in this case study today and the marketing for this whole campaign was done by our marketing agency Growwie and Homepreneurs Club is of course owned by me. But what we did is a combination of a lot of marketing strategies that we have done for a lot of our other clients and this is a case study that I want to present to you so that you can implement the same in your businesses on increasing your growth, on to make your business 2x, 3x, whatever that is your goal, right? So we are going to look at how we did this. So initially to start with, I’ll talk about what we did in this three-week campaign in last month in January.
So when we were to do this campaign, the main objective of the campaign was to increase the number of members to 200 members from 82, right? We started the campaign with 82 members and how we did this was we brought in a new offer in the club where we were closing the doors of the club on 25th of January. So that was a three-week period we had plus next time when we open the doors, the price of the club is going to increase for the new members that’s going to come up. So this was the offer that we had and how did we market this? What was the whole campaign about? So this is what I’m going to share in the next areas.
To start with, the first part was the team collaboration. So we have within our agency, we have different departments, right? So we have our ads department, we have our social and content creation department, we have our graphics design team, we also have our sales team, we also have our technical team that does all our landing pages and all our technical sides of the website and everything. So all of these teams came together to create the whole marketing strategy and campaign for the launch.
Tools and Platforms Used
Now before we go into the details of the campaign, I’m going to share the tools that we use for running this campaign. So it started with Kajabi. So Kajabi is the platform that we use for hosting our membership.
It is a learning management system, you might already know about it. So the good thing about Kajabi is it can help you in hosting all your content. It also helps you with the email marketing, managing the database of all your members.
So all of it is there on Kajabi. And the second platform that we use is Airtable. So for all our internal data management and all the small CRM systems that we require for our clients, we use Airtable.
So here as well, we used Airtable to manage all the inquiries, what stages they were in, which all clients or which all members require follow-up, which all members has already been closed, which all have had inquiries, which of them said no, and we moved them to the lowest lead. So all these processes of CRM were done on Airtable. And the third tool that we use for our marketing was Wati.
Pre-planning and Early Campaign Phases
So you might have heard about Wati, it’s a WhatsApp API marketing platform that we use. So this is the first time we implemented WhatsApp marketing for our Homepreneurs Club. So basically we had a huge database of our, a lot of people who’s been on our email marketing and we all, we had all their WhatsApp numbers as well, which we had collected through our different campaigns that we did in the past with our freebies by giving away our freebies through our free events that we have been doing, all the registrations.
So all of these, we had a huge database of people who are already following us. So we implemented WhatsApp marketing where we were sending out campaigns during this three weeks period about our club, about the offers and so many things related to the club. And the fourth tool that we use was Microsoft Teams.
That was for all our internal data management and how we were coordinating with our internal teams so that we could all keep all the data in one place. Now coming to the whole marketing itself, right? So this marketing doesn’t happen just by doing the three weeks of campaign. There was a lot of pre-planning that was done.
So if we were to tell how the whole campaign was built, the three weeks campaign in January, 2024 is what the whole major campaign was about. But the pre-planning started, I would say back in August, 2023. So that’s like six months period, right? In August, 2023, we were around 50 members in the club.
So we did our initial campaign to have an initial boost of the club. So at that time it was, we were closing the summer periods and we said we created a summer 50 offer in which our members were getting 50% off on the first month membership. So this was the whole campaign was about.
And at that time, we increased the membership to around 70 members. And then over a period of the next few months until December, we had another 10 people join in. So we went to around 82 members by the end of December.
And now the pre-planning period was not just those people who were enrolling with us. There was also a period in which we were running ads to a lot of freebies and resources that we were providing to women entrepreneurs who like we had introduced a lot of freebies called Instagram starter kit, Facebook starter kit, TikTok starter kit. All these are information that most of the women entrepreneurs are looking for in order to implement in their business, right? So we created value for our customer base and this was being downloaded by a lot of people.
That is how we had increased our database of our email list and WhatsApp list to around 4,000 to 4,500 email lists, as well as the WhatsApp list of around 1,000 to 1,500 people. And the next area coming to the actual marketing methods that was implemented during this three weeks period. So we had five methods that was being implemented.
Marketing Methods Implemented
One was the organic social media, which of course you have all seen the posts that come on entrepreneurs club Instagram page, LinkedIn page, Facebook page, Facebook group, etc. And then the next was the ad strategy. So we had spent quite a bit of amount on running ads to our right type of content.
I’ll be talking about what content we use later on. So this was the second part, the ad strategy. The third was, of course, again, which I mentioned already, WhatsApp marketing using a tool called Wati.
If you want to know more details about it, feel free to comment in the chat box below so that I can give you more details about that as well. And the next thing was affiliate marketing. So there were a few people who, few members who signed up as affiliates with us and they also became our brand ambassadors for our homepreneurs club.
So that was what we did with affiliate marketing. And we also hired somebody for sales. So basically all the inquiries that come into the club, can I know more details about the club? I want to join the club.
So all these things, most of the conversions that happened, most of them wanted to know more details and they wanted that touch of human element, right? Because when you’re signing up for something, they want to know, okay, is this genuine? Is this real? What is the benefit that I’m going to get? So it’s always better if there is a human who is going to call you and talk to you and tell you more about it. And then you make an informed decision about the membership. Now coming to the ad strategy, which is the core area of our agency, the performance marketing agency.
So I believe that when you’re running ads, of course, you need to have a technical know-how of the platform. How do you set up your audience? How do you set up your pixels, trackers, and all those jargons which they say in the ads world, right? You need to, of course, have those knowledge, but most important part of it is the strategy and the messaging angle. The customer should get exactly the right kind of messaging.
It should not really look like an ad content, right? So when we were creating the ads, we focused on bringing a lot of testimonials. So testimonials were the other members who were already part of the club, who were talking and sharing their success stories. So when a customer or when another women entrepreneur who wants to start or who wants to join the membership, when they see somebody similar to them talking about how they benefited by being part of that community, that makes a huge difference, right? So that is one of the best performing content that we had in terms of our ads.
Content Strategy and Engagement
And we also had recorded a few podcast episodes with some of our members sharing their success stories after how they joined Homepreneurs Club and how they achieved success in their business. So these transformation stories is also what contributed a lot to creating very good high performing content for our ad strategy. And the results that we got from the ads, we had spent about 14 to 15,000 during those three weeks period.
And from that, we were able to get 92 enrollments. So that is like a customer acquisition cost of 150 to 160 dirhams per customer. So that was the whole idea of the campaign and how we implemented it.
And the reason why I’m sharing openly these statistics with you is because if you are a business owner and if you want to grow your business to 2x or 3x or 4x, I want you to understand the kind of effort that goes into. But if you put the right kind of strategies and different touch points, you are going to achieve what you are looking for in your business, right? So this is why we want to share the whole case study of how a whole campaign is executed for our different clients. Now, of course, all the content that we created for our social media ads were also used for our social media platform organically as we were tagging these members so that it was also reaching to their audience to their network.
So that was something that was very organically happening on our Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn channels of the Homepreneurs Club. So just to give a gist of what all type of content we used during this three weeks period was one was that me as a founder, I showed up online almost every one or two days and I actually announced the target of the campaign to the world. And I started speaking about every day how much progress we were making in the campaign.
This brought in a lot of support from a lot of people, like not even women. There were a lot of support from a lot of men as well who came forward, who started sharing about our Homepreneurs Club with their network, with the women entrepreneurs in their network, because they all of them genuinely wanted to support the initiative that we were doing. So that was one of the major part of our campaign itself.
Reflection on Campaign Success
It wasn’t really a planned part of the campaign. Everything else that we said were part of the plan. But this was something that we wanted to implement impromptu because I felt that there were a lot of women who are scared to put in goals and targets in their business because they were scared what if I didn’t achieve.
So even in my case, the whole target was to reach 200. So we didn’t achieve that. But still, when you announce a target publicly, one is it makes you self-accountable.
It makes you push yourself harder. And the whole team that who is working with you, they also know the goal and it’s gone public, right? So the amount of work that we put into and the encouragement the whole team members get and every enrollment we were getting, we were celebrating inside the club and everybody was really super charged up. And it was not just inside our marketing team that we were celebrating.
We were also sharing a lot of this online publicly to the world, even to our members so that they were all celebrating the growth of the whole community. So that was also one huge part of how the success of the campaign happened. Then the other type of content that we created for our social media was we had a few live Q&A sessions on Instagram channels.
We also had again the testimonials and reviews. We also had the static posts that we were doing as countdown posts from the 10 days onwards. So when we reached 10 days, we started doing a countdown live on our social media.
So that what happens is because there is a closing doors that’s happening, a lot of people tend to forget. So that we wanted to make sure that everybody is seeing and they are reminded that the closed door is going to come, right? So that was another part of the content that we were creating. Other area of the marketing that we implemented was WhatsApp marketing.
We have been implementing email marketing for the last three years for the club that was still implemented this time as well. But when I compared with WhatsApp marketing and email marketing results, the impact that was created by WhatsApp marketing was really, really huge because we look at the statistics of everything that we do because we, our performance marketing team and the agency, we believe in making decisions based on the data. We don’t believe in intuitions.
Evaluation of Marketing Methods
We don’t just go by, okay, this might work well, that might work well, or the customer might come and tell, you know, my client does this. Then we tell, okay, let’s see what the data says. So we always test out.
So this campaign gave us a very clear picture on how both works. So the response rate on WhatsApp marketing was huge. We had a lot, every time we sent out a campaign, we had a very good delivery rate for the first thing itself, because on emails, a lot of it used to go into the spams and a lot of things, right? But in WhatsApp marketing, most of those messages were getting delivered.
And the second part was that we were getting replies from a lot of them. And most of those replies were asking more questions about what this is about, what this club is about, you know, and then that those leads that came in, ask questions, were passed on to our salesperson. And she was the one who was calling and explaining about every benefit and every feature of the club so that they could make an informed decision as if it’s the right platform for them.
So what the WhatsApp marketing platform that we used worked immensely well for this campaign. And the other two part of the marketing was, of course, we made the right decision in hiring a salesperson for this particular campaign, because we knew that there would be a lot of inquiries. And it’s not just easy by just typing and replying by emails or by WhatsApp, it would take a lot of time.
And most of the time when it is through messaging, there is no human element. So we decided every inquiry we get, we were going give them a five minutes call, tell them all the details and then let them make a decision. So this is why we added that human element into the marketing.
And the other part was affiliate marketing, wherein the ambassadors of our club, they were going and speaking about benefits of how it benefited them as a business owner. So all the ambassadors of our club were a member, as well as they had really benefited from the club. So we really picked and chose five people from our club who we know has genuinely and really, really benefited from the club so that, you know, they could really go out there and speak about how those benefits has resulted into growing their businesses.
So that is why we picked those, picked and chose those people who would be the right affiliates for us in this whole journey. So now coming to the challenges part, right? So I wouldn’t say these were huge challenges, but of course, because it was part of the strategy to keep the campaign for three weeks. So that was also a challenge for our marketing team, because the time period was really less.
Challenges Faced and Lessons Learned
And in terms of content, though, we had much more plans in terms of content, I think there were a few of the content that we couldn’t deliver on time, because the content planned for the three weeks period was also huge. But I think we did quite a good job in there. And the next part, which we saw was that the landing page content, which we created, though it was performing well, what we realized, though we had very good conversions, but there were very less direct conversions on the landing page.
Most people wanted to speak to somebody before they were taking the decision to join the club. So maybe next time when we do a campaign like this, we might look at making the sales pages a little bit more better performing. Of course, we understand the need for people to speak to a human, there were a few people who actually directly converted from the website just directly from the ads as well.
But if you look at the percentage of that, it wasn’t so much as as the ones who really wanted to speak to somebody on a call and then convert. All in all, the campaign was a huge success for us. Because when we started it, we had 82 members, and we closed the campaign at 174 members, which is more than two times the growth for the club.
And we are immensely proud to as an agency to be able to be part of this campaign and to create a 2x growth for this whole campaign. So if you are somebody who’s looking to grow your business to 2x to 3x to 4x to 10x, whatever that X is, get in touch with us, we are here to help you create the right sort of campaign. So like I said, what worked for one business is not work for the other business, right? So we will customize the whole campaign and the whole marketing strategy around your business.
And we always work around what your target is, what your target revenue is, and we always reverse engineer the process for you. So this is the whole campaign was about and feel free to get in touch with us. Our team will be there to create that customized marketing plan for you and to create much more campaigns and clients for your business.
Thank you and I look forward to see you guys in the next episode. Until then, see you. Bye bye.
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